During my last day in Egypt, I decided to explore the port city of Alexandria where the ship was docked. I went out with Greg, Kasie, and another Sarah that we had met on the Cairo/Luxor trip. We ended up going to this market area where some tall guy asked if we wanted to look at jewelry at his store. It was only a little sketchy, so of course we said yes. It was fun because while we were there buying kartouches, the whole family came out to hang with us in the one room of the store. It was so funny. The little brother kept playing different music that he thought we would like. The mom was just sitting there reading a newspaper in Arabic, and about 2-3 uncles or cousins popped their head in the door while we were sitting there. One funny thing that happened when we were there is that we needed to get more cash at an ATM to buy our jewelry, so we had to leave the store, walk down the street and around the corner to the nearest ATM. As we were walking through what I had THOUGHT was the produce market, suddenly all of the vendors started FRANTICALLY packing up their goods - throwing everything into boxes and onto carts and shoving things into alleyways. Not even kidding, the busy street we had been walking down was deserted in less than 30 seconds. No people, no animals, no produce. I was looking around in disbelief…wondering what the heck was going ON? When we got to the end of the street, I spotted a few police officers hanging around the entrance to the street. I guess their presence must have scared all of the vendors away. I’m not sure though, because when we left that same way a few minutes later, ALL of the vendors were set up again and doing business. Anyway, the cool part of this story is that now I can say that I have visited an underground produce market in Egypt! Haha It makes me sound so adventurous.
After we bought some jewelry, the older brother helped us get to the main street and got us a cab to get to our next destination. That was nice of him, because we got a really inexpensive price for the drive. There are no meters in cabs in Egypt – you have to argue about the price before you get into a cab. This system is a bit discriminatory for tourists because you don’t really know what to ask for because you don’t have a sense of how far you are going. I’ve found that you can usually judge how much it SHOULD be by taking the original price the driver asks for (say 50 Egyptian pounds) and then cutting that down to a fourth or a fifth of that original price (so like 10-20 Egyptian pounds – or 3-4 dollars for all of us if you do the conversion).
A note about traffic in Egypt: it is super scary and you are putting your life into the hands of the taxi driver everything you get in. I thought it was scary traveling on a bus until I rode in a taxi and discovered exactly what terror is.
Anyway, after the jewelry shopping, we went to have lunch at an Egyptian fast food joint. The café was right across the way from the great Library of Alexandria. This was once the oldest libraries in the world, but is suffered through a couple of fires and other disasters so they had to rebuild. The shape of the building is so interesting – it’s a sundial that is slanted diagonally down toward the sidewalk. There are 11 floors and they have about 1 million items to borrow. The library can hold up to 8 million books, so they have tons of room to grow. As a matter of fact, I saw many empty bookshelves where they must be planning for more books. Another cool thing about the library is that it is also the home to a few small museums. My favorite was the Manuscript Museum, where I got to see original books from the first Library of Alexandria. These books were made of papyrus and represented a wide variety of religious and spiritual beliefs. It was interesting to think about how much value the Egyptians must place on learning about other cultures and sharing their knowledge with others. It’s a cool concept and…what can I say? I’m a sucker for a good library. : ) I loved it.
After checking out the library and the gift shop (of course), we got a cab to the new part of Alexandria. On the outskirts of the city, there is a new shopping complex complete with a Carrefour (which I believe is like a French Walmart). Anyway, it was fun to shop in a big store again, even if I didn’t understand anything that I wanted to buy…Also it was so busy, that families would come together and put one person in line with an empty shopping buggy and then each family member had a list of their designated items. They would run around and toss things into the cart as they passed by to get the next item while one person waited with the buggy until it was time to check out. Crazy, but I have to say I am impressed with their strategy.
We got back to the ship around 5 PM – an hour before “on-ship” time. There was a gigantic line in front of the ship because several Semester at Sea trips got back at that time as well. It took about 45 minutes to get past security and get on the ship. I had to hurry up and scribble out my postcards before the last call for mail went out. That night, we set sail for a 5 day stretch to Morocco. The time in Egypt went by so quickly!
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